Tagged Questions

I was going through the list of files included in coreutils and I was able to come up with an example of how I could personally use all of the commands provided except for ptx. Can you give one or two ...

Many un*x systems ship with a user account named 'operator'. What is the purpose of this account?
Do some systems actually make use of this account, or is this more of a historical legacy? Have you ...

Why does the "she-bang" begin with a #!, like #!/bin/bash? I have always accepted that this how it is done, but is there a reason behind it?
Why start with #; isn't that usually a comment? Or is it ...

As per my knowledge/understanding both help and man came at the same time or have very little time difference between them. Then GNU Info came in and from what I have seen is much more verbose, much ...

I'm trying to piece together the names of the people who contributed to BSD Unix, according to the contents of the SCCS logs. (This is the version control system used at the time.) A number of names ...

Having a discussion at work with a colleague, and he is claiming graphical installers for *nix environments have only been available for the last few years, but I can't find any solid information on ...

This is just a bit of history rummaging... I'd like to know how different today's grep is to the original implementation, introduced by Ken Thompson in ed. which evolved to ex, which then became vi...
...

The g option (e.g. s/pattern/replacement/g) for many tools that use regex-style pattern matching and the :g command in ed, ex, vi, and vim have pretty similar usage and meaning: match the given regex ...

What's the difference between zsync and jigdo? Their core functionality seems the same, so I'm curious on things like performance, file size, and ease-of-use. Would also be interesting to know why one ...

The Linux kernel is almost 25 years old. If I had to come up with the short version on the development history of the Linux kernel since 1991(its inception date), and in partcular since 1994 (1.0.0) ...

I often run commands using subshells, and sometimes would like to have the subshells expanded before I run something.. This way I could verify what I'm doing, and possibly edit what's about to happen ...

Where did the list of X11 color names come from? Every resource I've found online claims the origin is unknown, but it must be recorded somewhere. The best information I've found was in an archived ...

Does the Linux kernel use original Unix code or do they share the idea?
He mocked me and said it's a stupid question to ask and of course they share the idea not the code. Since both are written in C, ...

In the list of signals defined in a linux system, there are two signals stated as User Defined signals (SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2). Other signals will be raised or caught in specific situations, but SIGUSRs ...

I'm writing an article about FOSS and Linux music players. What was the very first music player application for Linux? Was there ever a time when the players didn't support proprietary formats like ...

This question is merely for idle curiosity, but I suspect others will be curious as well. Searching through errno.h (of Linux 2.6) I found ENOANO "No Anode". There is no sign of a "No cathode" error. ...

If Mac OS X is a Unix, as answered in this question, why is it that it is not open sourced and the license is proprietary, as stated in this Wikipedia article?
According the the genealogy from this ...

gdisk stands for GPT fdisk. cfdisk stands for curses fdisk. And so on and so forth.
However, what does the original "f" in fdisk stand for? The only things I can think of would be either "files" or ...

It seems you can pass in a variable name like 'file' for -I argument of xargs, but there are a plethora of examples that use {}. Is this because of the backward compatibility? Or does it help with the ...

The tr command is almost 40 years old. It seemingly appeared in Unix for the first time in 1973 with Unix V4. The source for this is not available. Here is probably the second oldest available Unix ...

Looking into doing analysis of the lifespan of a line of code, and via another question on stackexchange I was pointed to a research paper on OpenBSD that I've got a few questions about.
That being:
...

Which tools were around »back in the day« to aid presentation Unix/Linux environments? I just wondered how somebody would accomplish something like slides in a e.g. text-based environment or low-end ...

Was it just to save typing one letter?
I don't think C function names were limited to five characters at the time, as strcmp and unlink are probably just as old.
I'm hoping someone who was involved ...

Is there a historical reason why Bash "globbing" and regular expressions are not identical? For example, I believe that in Bash [1-2]* matches anything that starts with a 1 or a 2 followed by anything ...